Let us, in the manner of Latin teachers, use 'love' as an example and look for 'love' in Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare. For this exercise keep in mind the important distinctions between a 'spelling', a 'word form', and a 'lemma'. The word 'love' can take different forms, such as 'loves', 'loveth', 'loving', 'loved'. A dictionary will give you the most common form of a word, the base form of a verb or the singular of a noun. The technical term for this dictionary entry form, which bundles all the other forms, is 'lemma', and 'lemmatization' refers to the process of bundling different forms of a word under its lemma. A 'word form' refers to a state of a lemma that has some conditions imposed on it. Thus in 'loved' the -d suffix specifies pastness. The different forms of a word are known as its 'morphology'. A 'spelling' is just what it says it is: a sequence of letters that stand for a particular word form (and sometimes for more than one). 'Loved', 'loued', 'louyd' are different ways of spelling what could be one of two word forms of the lemma 'love': the past tense or the past participle.

For any word occurrence in a WordHoard text, the program knows what word form and lemma the spelling in that location refers to, and it also knows what other spellings of that word form or what other word forms of that lemma exist in the corpus. The practical implication of this fact is that a search for a lemma will retrieve all spellings of all word forms.

In the Canterbury Tales the verb 'love' occurs first in the description of the knight as a man

That fro the tyme that he first bigan

To riden out, he loved chivalrie,

If you click on 'loved' and then follow the information about word forms you see at once what the grammarians used to the call the 'paradigm' of the verb:

There is, however, one big and useful difference between this table and a paradigm in a traditional grammar. Instead of seeing a systematic representation of legal forms, you see the frequency distribution of actually occurring forms, which in this particular case lets you see almost at once that Chaucer's morphology is predominantly 'modern' rather than 'medieval'. The modern forms 'love' and 'loved' are much more common than the Middle English forms 'loven', 'lovede', 'loveden' and 'yloved'. You come to the same conclusion by looking at the distributions of more common verbs with greater morphological and orthographic variance, such as 'say', 'have', or 'be'.

Sometimes the different spellings of a word will throw a light on its origin. Take the opening line of the Canterbury Tales: "Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote." The meaning of the last word is not obvious. It is glossed as 'sweet'. If you see that the more common spellings of that word are 'swote' (18) and 'swoote' (8) you recognize instantly that it is in fact a dialectal variant of 'sweet'.

Spenser used a lot of spellings that were idiosyncratic and deliberately archaic by the standards of his own day. For that reason, modern editions of his poems are always printed with their original spellings. WordHoard lets you capture his orthographic variance. For 'love' this turns out to be not especially interesting. You see quickly that he usually spells 'love' 'loue'. But so do all his contemporaries. 'Bloody' is more interesting: of the 112 occurrences of that adjective only two are spelled the modern way, and the preferred spellings are 'bloudy' (56), 'bloudie' (43), 'bloodie' (6), and 'blouddy'(4). This simple example also shows that you would need fairly complex 'wildcard' or 'regular expression' searches to capture orthographic variance with precision.

With the WordHoard Shakespeare text, the utility of displaying orthographic and morphological variance diminishes somewhat. It is a modern spelling edition to begin with, and except for the second person singular, Shakespeare's morphology is no richer than that of modern English. Lemmatization remains useful in distinguishing the different word forms or lemmata represented by such spellings as 'may', 'art', 'will', 'like' and so forth. It is easy and useful to look for the 92 occurrences of the noun 'art' without having to worry about the 906 occurrences of the verb form 'art'.

But the metadata in WordHoard let you ask additional questions about word usage. Do men and women differ in the frequency with which they talk about 'love'? Is 'love' more often the subject of verse than prose?

If you know your way around WordHoard, fifteen minutes' work will let you construct a table like the following:

This corroborates in more precise terms what you might have expected. Men speak a lot more than women (the ratio is 4.7) and verse is more common than prose by a ratio of 3.2. A little eighth grade math shows you that, relatively speaking, Shakespeare's women are about 50% more likely to speak of love than men and that the noun 'love' is almost twice as common in verse as in prose.

But this may be too coarse an analysis. Women speak relatively more in comedy (the male: female ratio is about 3:1), and love is a big topic in comedy. Do women in comedies use the word love more often than men? You can find that out easily.